


One Last Tender Place

by searchforthescars



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 03:07:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29753130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/searchforthescars/pseuds/searchforthescars
Summary: Riza Hawkeye is strong, but even she is pained by the scars she bears...even the ones she chose.
Relationships: Riza Hawkeye/Roy Mustang
Comments: 12
Kudos: 35





	One Last Tender Place

**Author's Note:**

> Title and excerpt from Wishbone by Richard Siken. Content warnings for canon-typical mentions of scarring, vague hetero-centric language uses throughout. I followed the FMA:B timeline here, if that matters to anyone.
> 
> Dedicated to anyone who bears scars, seen or unseen. There is no shame in a life lived.

_ I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me, and I have to search  
my body for the scars... _

\--Richard Siken, _[Wishbone](https://anotherhand.livejournal.com/86133.html)_

* * *

You are eight years old, and the scab on the underside of your chin has turned into a scar.

“You shouldn’t have picked at it,” sighs your teacher, tilting your head this way and that with a motherly hand tucked under a chin. “You’d better hope it fades by the time you grow up. It’s not very pretty.”

You blink into Teacher’s cool grey eyes and frown. She has two brown spots at her temples, and a faint scar on her cheek. “You have scars, Miss. And you’re pretty!”

“Don’t you want boys to look at you and like what they see?”

“Why? Don’t they do that with you?”

You don’t understand why her face twists in a sad, unpleasant way moments before she shoos you outside to join your classmates.

* * *

You are twelve years old, and the sunburn on your face from too many hours in the garden has lent itself to a blister under your right eye.

You’re old enough now to understand how these things work; pretty girls get courtships and marriages, ugly girls grow up to be spinsters. Or, at least, that’s what the aunties in town say. You know that there’s no future like that for you for a myriad of different reasons, so you usually don’t pay it any mind.

Right now, however, there appears to be an exception. You inspect yourself in the mirror, and you prod at the blister, and you almost pop it before remembering yourself. Your teacher’s words rise in your mind, unbidden:  _ Don’t you want boys to look at you and like what they see? _

God help you, you hate it, but there’s one boy who looks at you like he thinks you’re something. The only problem is that the boy in question is your father’s apprentice, and so decidedly off-limits.

“You’re a fool, Riza Hawkeye,” you whisper to your reflection.

You pop the blister. The resulting scar doesn’t fade until the year your father dies.

* * *

You have just turned twenty, and you are standing on a stool in your bathroom like an idiot.

The mirror -- one of only two in your new Central City apartment -- is too high-up for you to see your entire back, and you’re so short that even getting on your tiptoes isn’t enough. Clad only in a loose pair of pants, and under the watchful eye of Black Hayate, you twist this way and that, wincing at how the burn scars pull. Still, after all these years, they ache.

“What do you think?” you ask the dog blinking up at you, one paw raised hesitantly in the air as if he’s worried you’ll fall. “That bad, huh?”

You touch the raised skin over your left shoulder. It doesn’t hurt. It just looks bad, which shouldn’t sting as much as it does. The skin, red and raw-looking, yet tough and thick, doesn’t feel like anything when you touch it. You can feel the texture, but nothing else. No pain. Just…

_ Just ugliness _ is what you were about to think, but you cut that thought off. No one needs you to be pretty. Colonel Mustang doesn’t need you to be pretty, and neither does your plan -- the only thing keeping you alive some days.

You step off the stool and sit down on the floor, reaching for your shirt and letting Hayate lick some of the makeup off your cheeks. State dinners are always a chore; the only reason Mustang invited you is that you’re his second-in-command and, as he says, it could never hurt to have a beautiful woman by his side.

It’s just another ruse. For that, you’re grateful. At least you can be useful.

As you wash your face and brush out your hair, your mind calls up a memory of the dinner: Mustang dancing with a diplomat’s wife, his fingers on the skin of her shoulder, bared by the dress. You see his fingers slide over the smooth skin, and the skin on your left shoulder burns.

You sleep in one of your high-necked sweaters that night. It seems like the safe thing to do.

* * *

You are twenty-eight, and your commanding officer can’t even look at you.

You neglected to recall, it seems, that when you cut your hair short, you’d be taking with it the ability to conceal the scar on your neck from the Promised Day. You neglected to consider that Brigadier General Mustang might not want to be reminded of your close brush with death.

It is, ironically, the only scar you cannot bring yourself to mind. If anyone finds this one ugly, you’ll have more than a few choice words to say about it.

Still, you take comfort in knowing your favored high-necked shirts cover the worst of the damage.

“It’s a shame,” one of the office aides says to you as you and several other assistants gather around the coffee pot in one of the administration buildings. “But at least you’ll have a good story to tell any dates.”

“What’s a shame?” you ask.

She gestures at the side of her neck. “It’s… Well, it’s not very pretty. But that’s alright; looks aren’t everything to the right man!”

You think about Mustang’s tight eyes when he sees you in a collared shirt, on the rare off-duty visits you pay to his apartment to drop off paperwork or bring by Hayate. You think about the sadness in his eyes when he saw the mark for the first time. You think about how, sometimes, you can feel your own pulse right there, under the jagged skin, a reminder of what you almost lost.

You buy a tube of makeup that night, the first cosmetic you’ve purchased in years, and shed tears of frustration when you realize not even the skin-toned pigment is enough to undo the damage.

* * *

You are thirty-five years old, and you wake to the feeling of fingers against your skin.

“Why don’t you ever take this off?” your husband --  _ your husband  _ \-- murmurs, pressing his palm to your shirt at the small of your back before walking his fingers over your arm again.

“Don’t want to,” you mumble into the pillow. You turn your head. “You don’t… You don’t need to see that.”

“Maybe I want to.”

A cocktail of anger, self-loathing, and sadness rushes through you. You sit up and pull your shirt off in one fluid motion, turning your back to him with set shoulders and a shaking voice that says, “Here.”

Mustang --  _ Roy  _ \-- has never seen the scars. He stayed with you the night after he burned you, but you sent him home afterward. He had work to do, and you couldn’t recover if you also had to keep up pretenses of propriety.

He lets out a sharp exhale. His fingers brush the ugly knotted skin under your left shoulder blade. You think about  _ Don’t you want boys to look at you and like what they see?  _ and you think about how smooth the skin of Rebecca’s shoulders looked when she danced with Havoc at your wedding. You think about the long-healed scar under your chin and the blister mark under your eye that still comes through when it’s sunny, and you don’t realize you’re crying until you take a deep breath at Roy’s behest.

“Does it hurt?”

Your voice is weak, but the logical response is the perfect distraction. “No. I stretch to keep the skin limber so there’s no loss of motion.”

He doesn’t say anything else, merely presses his palm flat to your old wounds before wrapping his arms around your waist and urging you to lie back by tugging you toward the warmth of his body. Your bare back pressed against his shirt feels nice in a way that hurts.

“I understand why you keep them covered,” he says into your hair. “I won’t burden you with apologies.”

_ Do you like what you see?  _ you think about asking. He falls asleep before your tongue stops cleaving to the roof of your mouth. The tears in your eyes wet the pillow until you fall into an uneasy sleep.

When you wake, it’s with Roy’s forehead pressed into your back and a now-familiar ache in your throat. The space between your shoulderblades prickles. The skin under your chin throbs.

**Author's Note:**

> All errors are my own, as this was dashed off and posted unbetaed. If you're curious about why this story exists, feel free to read the director's cut below:
> 
> I have a scar under my chin from where I busted my ass on a Razor scooter at age eight. I have a burn scar under my right eye from a blistered sunburn the summer I was twelve. And while I don't have burn scars on my back and shoulders, I was made to wear high-necked, thick, sleeved shirts from ages 13-20 because of scarring as a result of my chronic health conditions.
> 
> Like Riza in this story, I grew up being told that scars make you ugly, make you undesirable, are things to conceal because without them you will not earn favor. If I had met Riza Hawkeye at age 14 instead of at age 22, maybe I wouldn't have taken my past to heart. But I can't rewrite the past, so I wrote this instead.
> 
> Scars are a sore spot, even for someone as tough as Hawkeye, and I wanted to bring that up in this fic. I hope I did okay. Thank you for reading.


End file.
